About Me

Hi, I’m Alex.

I build communities, started one of the longest running coworking communities in the world, write a crapload of words every day, tweet a little too much, coach people to be the best version of themselves possible, can't stop learning new things, and do my very best not to take myself too seriously.

I have one goal: to fill the world with truly excellent collaborators so we can all work together, better.

Because let's be honest...most of us aren't very good at it.

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April 2008

To anyone who’s ever asked me why I “bother” to hand code everything instead of work with a WYSIWYG, I’m finally validated by the NY Times design director:

It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.
But really the browser-to-browser consistency that you see (and I have to admit, it’s far from perfect) is the result of a vigilant collaboration between many different groups — the visual designers and technologists in the design team that I lead, their counterparts in our technology staff, and the many, many detail-oriented people who come together to make the site a reality every hour of every day.

While I’m sharing link content relevant to hand coding methodology this morning (since this blog has taken a turn for the philosophical recently), make sure you check out the <em>Confessions</em> of a CSS Developer. Some of my favorites (and own confessions) include:

Everything before IE6 is dead to me

I passionately use the * {margin:0; padding:0} rule. Sometimes I feel rebellious and add border:0

I will seriously cry when all browsers fully support CSS 3

In light of the first half of this post, I’m willing to overlook confession #12 for the sake of the humor/accuracy in rest of them.

As we gear up for SocialDevCamp East in Baltimore on May 10, one of the things that we’d like to highlight is the diversity of Web 2.0 talent available here on the east coast.

The conventional wisdom today says that to make it as a social startup, you should a) move to San Francisco (preferably East Bay or SOMA), b) meet a bunch of cool people (natch), c) get funded (cake!), d) get featured in TechCrunch, e) build your startup to 500,000 users, f) get snapped up in an early acquisition by Google for $90M, g) repeat.

For lots of reasons, the odds of this working are low and getting lower. Why? For one, this is the conventional wisdom; everybody’s doing it, why shouldn’t you? Loads of ditto-heads are creating a glut of ideas. They all can’t win.

Second, VC investments are often a trailing indicator of successful business sectors. VCs follow what has worked previously, which leads to persistent failures at the end of a business cycle. Why else do you think they need to rely on outrageous 100x returns? To make up for their last round of losses.

Why do you live where you do? Family, a partner, school, friends, or do you simply love where you live? There are countless talented people who have made the same choice as you, and they’ve made this choice not as a runner-up to a life of glory in the Bay area. They’ve made the choice as a matter of personal identity and conviction.

As I meet members of the tech business community along the east coast, I hear two things consistently. One, that the Bay area is getting weird these days, and that they are “all smoking the same air.” Second, that the “VC community doesn’t get it here,” and that it’s hard to get funding and launch a web-based startup on the east coast.

Sorry, but we can’t have it both ways. We must choose: do you want to live in the Bay Area and sustain the vagaries of that echo-chamber culture, or do you want to grow where you’re planted and build viable businesses here?

The fact is that we can’t expect to improve the tech startup climate on the east coast if we don’t come together and make it what we want it to be. And that means we need to stop looking over our shoulder at the west coast and start building businesses here and now, using telework, co-work, or traditional workspaces.

This is part of what we want to address at SocialDevCamp East. If we want to have a thriving startup culture here, we need to build it — one relationship at a time.

Best,
Dave

Ironically…I found out about this event from the guy who seems to always be hooked into everything in San Francisco…and still manages to keep on enough of the pulse on the East Coast to be one step ahead of me. Thanks Chris. Someday, I’ll know about something before you do. Someday.

Patty Tawadros, a member of Philly Startup Leaders, invited me to sit on a panel about technology startups thriving in Philadelphia. The panel features, besides myself, a bunch of people from the local scene who represent a fantastically diverse perspective on the industry:

Julian Awad, CEO, Co-Founder, Smart Genetics LLC

Thomas M. Balderston, President & CEO, Mid-Atlantic Capital Alliance

Blake Jennelle, CEO, Anthillz, and Founder, Philly Startup Leaders

Patricia Tawadros, CEO, Xercel, Inc.

Steve Welch, Co-Founder, DreamIt Ventures

PSL is co-sponsoring this event, along with the Center City Proprietors Association.
The panel topic looks something like this:

Philadelphia is no longer just a biotech hot spot. Work is underway to turn the city into the Silicon Valley of the east coast. Ambitious entrepreneurs are blazing a trail to build a technology hub in Philadelphia, create more high tech jobs, and foster the growth and success of new technology firms. Join us for a fresh perspective from technology leaders and the investors behind their creative endeavors.

The event is taking place at Helium Comedy Club at 2031 Sansom St from 5:30-7pm on Wednesday, April 23.
Patty asks you to RSVP if you plan to attend–call the Center City Proprietors Association at 215-545-7766
This event is free for CCPA and Philly Startup Leaders members, $20 for non-members, includes complimentary hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar.

I wasn’t just trolling for comments, I actually was curious what the notion of creativity or a creative person was to different people. As expected, there was some really great variance in the responses. The real answer (if there is one) that I was looking to glean from the responses was that variance itself. I was interested in the different definitions because of another concept that has a bunch of different definitions, as well as connotations: Agency.

I was introduced to some of these concepts, like many other things that I hold dearly, by my friends at CitizenAgency. I remember when I first read the story of how they came to decide on the name for their consultancy, which is almost entirely based around helping companies create opportunities to extend agency into their userbases. Into their citizenship. The notion of Agency in this case was philosophical, the ability to help your users make good choices and ultimately, feel empowered to kick ass.

I’ve always felt that the concept that drives CitizenAgency is incredibly special, and the results of the projects that Chris and Tara have been involved in speak to that. Recently, and leading up to last weeks question, I’ve been mulling over the combination of the two polymorphic notions of “creative” and “agency”, and the fact that many of my industry’s businesses consider themselves creative agencies. And while they may or may not be fulfilling one (or many) of the different concepts of creative that people contributed to my last post, the vast majority of them miss out on the agency part in a pretty big way.

Part One – Creative Agency for the Client:

Firm/independent fulfills request, with the end user of the project in mind

In some of the best cases, there’s a discovery phase in between to help the creators understand the client’s intent. What’s missed, more often, is client education. Client involvement. And most importantly, reminding the client why they hired the firm or independent in the first place: because we’re the experts.

My intention with that statement is not to be condescending, but the reality of the relationship is that we, as the creators, are responsible for leading the client just as much as we are leading the project and the result that the end user experiences.

My problem in this part one discussion is that so many “agencies” do at least one of two things wrong. They ignore client education, or even worse, they roll over to client whims for the sake of avoiding confrontation. Without naming names or pointing fingers, this was the number one complaint I had with both of my full time jobs with interactive firms. They lead and executed amazing production work. And maybe it was simply because of where I sat in the ranks, but I never felt like the client had involvement in the project where it counted.

In another one of my (ramblier) posts, I talked about the notion of doer-enablers, and creating an experience where a non-creative person can feel the creative process. In as many projects as possible, I’ve tried to put just as much focus on my experience with the client as I did on the experience we were creating together for their end user. And most importantly, I did a good job of engaging with clients who would be receptive to the education. I always let them feel that it was appropriate to push back on my suggestions, but at the same time, if I could take that push back and turn it into an opportunity to teach them something new and stand my ground, I would. Maybe I’m lucky to have had some really rad clients and partners. But I really think it was more about setting that precedent early and committing to carrying it forward.

Part Two – Creative Agency for the Talent:

The other thing I started to think about when I was analyzing “creative” and “agency” next to one another was the fact that most creatives are so busy “thinking outside of the box” (that one’s for you, Mike Propst) that they’re not particularly good at looking out for themselves. The horror stories I read on FreelanceSwitch about people getting taken advantage of blow me away. I understand that some folks simply lack the business savvy, but that leaves a big open hole for people really put focus on perfecting craft, which I have an immense amount of respect for. So what can we do for those people?

You’re probably surprised I got this far in a post without mentioning coworking, and here’s the part where I live up to your expectations. I look at the interactions at IndyHall and other coworking communities that I observe from a distance and think that we’re in a fantastic position to help with this other type of agency, the one that borders on the far ends of the philosophical version I spoke about before. The type I’m thinking about is more along the lines of talent agency, where someone with the business savvy that a creative might lack is able to represent, mentor, and advise the creative in decision making. The difference in this type of agency (which, in my mind, plays out a bit like the talent agencies of Hollywood, but without the likes of Ari Gold and his extreme antics) is that it puts heavy focus on helping and representing talent, and the client interaction mentioned in part #1 of

this post is the responsibility of the talent themselves. Think of it like an advisory board for hire.

One of the most exciting parts of my contributions to discovering the model we’ll be using at ChoiceShirts on our t-shirt designer community is this same concept: designers that not only work together, but support one another with their independent strengths. The model goes even deeper in the fact that ChoiceShirts itself will be extending its business, marketing, production, fulfillment, and distribution facilities to the artists it represents. This is creative agency, as I see it..

So how does coworking fit into this? Well, the problems in traditional talent agency models are, in my best estimation, rooted in greediness. Something amazing and empowering to me about the coworking community at large, and the culture it breeds, is how un-greedy it is. The contributory sentiments of all of our members at IndyHall, and nearly every interaction I’ve had on the coworking list or with members of another coworking space, lend themselves greatly to the concept of advising other creatives.

Generosity does not equate to poverty. William Hurley (Whurley, to friends across the universe) wrote some time back about how being an open source software developer does not, and should not, condemn ones self to a life of poverty. If we can apply those ideals (of give and take, and community moderation) to a Creative Agency for talent representation, we might be onto something special. And that’s the kind of “special” stuff I expect from my coworking cohorts.

The crew at IndyHall was talking this morning about all of the different definitions of creative, and how they vary from person to person. This is leading somewhere, I promise. But I need some reader feedback first.

Tonight marks the 1 month anniversary of the evening before I left for Austin, Texas to attend SXSW Interactive 2008. In 6 days, it will be 1 month since I returned home to Philadelphia and began processing all I had learned and accomplished while at the conference.

I’m thinking about how much has gotten done in the last 30 days and what’s changed since leaving SXSW. While I’m making my own notes, I’d love to hear from other people how their last 30 days of reflection (and recovery) have gone.

So tell me:

What are you up to these days?
Who/what is inspiring you?
Who/what has changed your perspective?
Who did you meet that set you on a path of achieving awesome?
Who do you miss the most?
Have you been following through on the things you promised yourself you’d do when you got back from Austin?